


but you cannot run, and you cannot hide

by OceanTiger23



Category: The Hobbit - All Media Types
Genre: (Formerly) Modern Middle Earth, F/F, F/M, M/M, Multi, Post-Apocalypse, Rating May Change, Zombie AU, be advised
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-08-24
Updated: 2018-08-24
Packaged: 2019-07-01 20:44:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 8,355
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15781782
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OceanTiger23/pseuds/OceanTiger23
Summary: Years later, Bilbo wouldn’t be able to explain what had caused him to run toward the source of the noise rather than away from it. He’d become a creature of instinct, and in the end that was probably what accounted for everything that was to follow.





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> (Clearly, the answer to having an unfinished WIP is to start another WIP. Um. Yeah.) If anybody reading this is also waiting on Tin Can, please know I haven't abandoned that story. The last few chapters have gotten a bit sticky, but I'm getting close to the end, and I'm excited to bring it to its conclusion.
> 
> While I'm working on that, I'm also very excited to start this story. This is something I've been thinking about since April. It's my first fic in the Hobbit fandom, and my first zombie AU.

For Bilbo Baggins, the beginning of the end had come during an uneventful afternoon at Westfarthing Comprehensive.

Years later he wouldn’t be able to remember the question he’d asked. It had been something simple, he knew. Low-risk. Something along the lines of, “It’s either yes or no; there isn’t a right answer. I’m only asking you to have an opinion, or at least pretend to.” _By a show of hands, show me you’re alive in there_. Of the thirty some-odd teenagers looking dully back at him, about seven in total had raised their hands. Then the bell had rung, and while he’d stared at them, dumbstruck, he’d forgotten to assign their homework.

And that had been it, really. Bilbo had marched over to the headmaster’s office and immediately given his notice.

Walking out to his car fifteen minutes later, the satchel containing his laptop banging into his hip, the contents of his office in a cardboard box, he felt a little lightheaded. It was only when he’d dumped his belongings on the passenger’s seat and slid behind the wheel that he was struck by the magnitude of his decision. The sense of lightness it gave him filled him like a balloon. He started to giggle. Soon he was in tears of mirth.

Leaning on the steering wheel he hit the horn by mistake, and it made him laugh harder until he was wheezing for breath. Eventually he managed to calm down and dry his eyes, only to see Belinda Bracegirdle, Westfarthing Comp’s sympathetic but nosy receptionist, staring at him as she trotted by in her sensible pumps. He’d given her a little wave and driven off, maybe a bit faster than usual, in the direction of his apartment.

No more miserable afternoons reading the same essays over and over again. No more talking at a room of dead-eyed fifteen-year-olds until he was blue in the face. No more vaguely condescending remarks from nosy relatives. No more trips to the same bloody aisle of the same bloody supermarket for the same bloody milk in the same bloody pouring rain.

He’d have to make a trip to Bag End to clear things up, make arrangements. Hamfast was going to be, well, surprised, but maybe a little relieved on Bilbo’s behalf. He was forever wondering about Bilbo’s general state of being, although he tended to attribute his constant, simmering discontent to Bilbo’s lack of a wife (hah). But it didn’t matter. Bilbo would sell his things—or, more likely, pitch whatever he couldn’t pawn off on charity—get rid of the car, book the cheapest flight he could find overseas, and be long gone by the end of the week.

The thought made him giddy.

* * *

Back in the parking lot at Westfarthing Comp, Belinda Bracegirdle was struggling with her keys. It had begun to drizzle. She had let slip a curse, but only a very tame one: she _was_ technically still at school. The thought made her chuckle a little, and this had the effect of preventing her from hearing a student approach from behind.

It was one of the dead-eyed fifteen-year-olds from Bilbo’s modern literature class. Her skin had taken on a sickly, grayish complexion. She was shuffling. Her eyes were quite blank.

Belinda saw her at the last possible moment, reflected in the window of her sensible, burgundy station wagon. She jumped but recovered herself with all the dignity of a twenty-year veteran of secondary education. Before she could utter so much as a _hello dear,_ however, the student lunged forward, plaits bouncing with her momentum, and sunk her teeth straight into Belinda’s veiny neck.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Credit where credit's due: the (possibly working, possibly final) title of this story is lovingly borrowed from lyrics from "The Mess Inside," by The Mountain Goats. The name "Westfarthing Comprehensive" may or may not be nicked from the inimitable perkynurples' "Nothing Gold Can Stay."


	2. Chetwood

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There were a lot of things Thorin would have worried about before: the next project deadline, or his utilities bill, or how much caffeine his heart could handle before it inevitably gave out, or how often he was getting to the gym. (Sometimes he wished he could worry about how often he was getting to the gym.) Three years was supposedly a long time to adjust, and some days it felt like an eternity for all that had happened. But if he ever had a moment to himself, if he really let himself think about it, Thorin knew: three years wasn’t very long at all.

_Three years later:_

The room was already bright with daylight. It streamed through a crack in the curtains, and a window-shaped patch of it fell across the sheet. The figure in the bed shifted, drifting slowly into wakefulness. On cue, an obnoxious, blaring alarm sounded from the small, cuboid clock sitting on the windowsill. The figure reached over and swatted it into silence. He then lay there for a moment with his eyes shut, before sitting up, blinking blearily at the rest of the room, and swinging his legs out of bed.

Thorin wasn’t a morning person. It was why he’d chosen the east-facing room for a bedroom, the one that had once been an office. The alarm clock was also his for that reason. It was solar-powered: something Kili had found in a roadside gift shop more than two years back. It worked surprisingly well, even with the dent in the corner from the time Thorin had accidentally knocked it off the windowsill. He had resigned himself to waking up this way: these days, an obnoxious alarm was the least of his worries.

There were a lot of things Thorin would have worried about _before_ : the next project deadline, or his utilities bill, or how much caffeine his heart could handle before it inevitably gave out, or how often he was getting to the gym. (Sometimes he wished he could worry about how often he was getting to the gym.) Three years was supposedly a long time to adjust, and some days it felt like an eternity for all that had happened. But if he ever had a moment to himself, if he really let himself think about it, Thorin knew: three years wasn’t very long at all.

He dressed in layers: jeans, a tee-shirt, flannel. The morning was cool and dewy, but it would be hot and humid by midday and he wouldn’t be around for a change of clothes.

In the kitchen, Dis was already up. She’d lit the stove and was boiling water, wrapped in her threadbare, periwinkle bathrobe, strands of hair slithering out of her braid. She was always the first up. She woke with the first rays of the sun, and that had started even before, back when Kili was born: it was something about being a parent.

It took Thorin a moment to realize the pan was already out and Dis was ladling something into it out of a large, flowery ceramic bowl. He raised a questioning eyebrow at his sister. It wasn’t often she got started cooking without him or Dwalin or Balin to share the chore.

“Omelets,” she said matter-of-factly.

“Omelets?”

“Omelets.” Dis flipped a large, flat egg-pancake onto a plate and put it on the table.

“What’s the occasion?”

“Dwalin thinks he’s found something good. It’s far, though.” She tapped his shoulder with her free hand. “He’s waiting outside.”

The kettle began to whistle behind her. Thorin went to the cabinet and got mugs.

One was another souvenir from the road. It had black, blocky capital letters: “WORLD’S BEST,” and underneath, the word “Uncle” messily scrawled in sharpie on a blue sticky note and taped to the ceramic, covering whatever word had been underneath. It had been funny for some reason, Thorin remembered. Maybe it had said “Auntie” or “Grandpa” or something like that.

The other belonged to the farm. Back when such things still existed, it had been custom-made, printed with a family photograph. The photo was of a child’s birthday party that seemed to be thunderstorm-themed. There were decorations hanging from the ceiling and strewn about the table in which curly, cartoon clouds and jagged, gold-yellow lightning bolts featured heavily. At the head of the table sat a gleeful toddler, no more than two or three, curly-haired and clapping over a lightning-bolt shaped candle. A large woman was bent over him. She shared his curly hair, his round eyes, and his smile. When Thorin and Dis had arrived at the farm six months out of Ered Luin, there had been no sign of them, or anyone else. There had been no graves, either.

As always, the table creaked and lurched a little bit when Thorin sat and reached for the instant coffee. There was a messy fistful of packets contained by a chipped soup mug in the center of the table, sharing space with crumpled bags of black tea and packets of sugar and year-old coffee creamer. The gesture was automatic, as was the act of tearing open the packet and pouring its contents into his mug, adding water, adding creamer, stirring, and choking it down. Dis was decidedly more graceful about sipping her tea, but then she wasn’t in a hurry, and her tea could actually be said to be _tea_ , and not a powdered vehicle for caffeine. You could get used to living without most things, Thorin had found, but not having decent coffee was a bitter pill to swallow.

As he ate, she handed him a list. He recognized Balin’s elegant handwriting.

“If Dwalin’s right, it should get us through the next few weeks,” Dis said, “but we need to talk about the garden again.”

Thorin nodded absently. “When we get back.”

“You’ll be dead on your feet when you get back,” she chided him.

“When we get back,” he repeated, and finished his omelet.

Dwalin was waiting outside at the gate, stretching, a healthy dab of sunscreen on his nose. Thorin waved the list before sticking it in his pocket.

“Beans?” Dwalin asked.

“Tuna, toilet paper, bleach, aspirin, duct tape, powdered milk. Pasta if they’ve got it, preferably macaroni—that’s Fee and Kee. And beans,” he confirmed grimly.

Dwalin grinned. “Let’s go shopping.”

* * *

Thorin’s life revolved around beans.

More broadly, it revolved around canned food. These days, if you weren’t already versed in gardening or already living on a farm, your best friend was a good, sturdy can opener. These Thorin’s family had intentionally hoarded: there was one to a person, and a few squirreled away just in case.

For Thorin, the beans were much like the instant coffee: fine in a pinch, and an adequate source of fuel, but nothing to be particularly fond of. Before there had been agonizing party conversations: _would-you-rathers_ and _what-would-you-give-ups_. Back then it had been impossible to imagine eating the same meal every day, multiple times a day, for months on end. Food had once been a source of enjoyment, meals a social event, for all that he’d been an antisocial prick at times. He’d been on dates that had involved cooking, and while he’d never been much of a cook himself, like anyone he’d enjoyed food for its own sake. Now it was just another part of the routine, like brushing his teeth before bed, or the blare of his alarm in the morning.

Still, the beans had to come from somewhere, and that was the point of the scavenging runs.

The shopping cart was stashed around the side of the house, behind a flower bed no one seemed to have used in years, even before they’d arrived. Thorin nudged it along the weedy garden path, and Dwalin helped him carry it over the cracked stepping stones and onto the asphalt road at the edge of the property.

They set off along the backroads. There were quicker routes to get anywhere, ones that cut through the remains of suburbs and little towns, but it was safer this way. In the earliest days, towns had attracted danger. Cities had been slaughterhouses, but nowhere with even a small concentration of people was truly safe. The wise (and the scared, whose fear proved a useful, primal kind of wisdom) had left urban areas early, disappearing into the surrounding forests, hiding out in cabins and bunkers, making their way to the edges of the world.

They carried almost nothing. Early on they’d learned the necessity of traveling light, especially when returning from a run laden with groceries. Apart from the list, between them they had two liter water bottles, a couple of sandwiches, a small bottle of sunscreen, and a loaded shotgun. The last was more of a precaution than anything: no one had had cause to use it on a run in over a year.

They walked in silence, switching off pushing the cart every couple of hours. The first time they’d gone scavenging—two days after they’d reached and settled in the farmhouse—they’d been uncomfortable with the quiet. There had been riffs about turning into hobos ( _in the kingdom of canned food, it’s the man with the can opener who’s King_ ) and jokes about riding the rails. (Never mind that some of them had actually _done_ all of that, the Ri siblings having hopped a freight train to get out of Ered Luin in the earliest days of the attacks.) They’d needed something to laugh about in order to make sense of it. Idly, Thorin wondered when exactly it had started to become just another part of their existence.

As the morning wore on, they passed under low-hanging tree branches, through overgrown picnic areas and trailheads. They half-pushed, half-dragged the cart across unpaved stretches of road, and once—slowly and carefully—carried it over a trickle of a stream. Eventually it became impossible to follow the backroads and they came to an empty, winding, two-lane highway, dandelions growing up through cracks in the crumbling shoulder. The town was seven miles out, further than either of them had ever been on a run. Though he’d grown used to being on his feet nearly all the time, Thorin could feel the ache of a long walk starting to press into the soles of his boots. Dis was right, he thought: he and Dwalin would be in no state to discuss the garden when they got back.

By mid-morning, they had already drained half their water bottles. Thorin was pushing the cart, screwing the cap back onto his when Dwalin pointed ahead. In the distance, on a grassy strip in the middle of the road, was a wooden sign. It was choked with weeds and cracked by an eager vine, but a close inspection confirmed they were where they needed to be. After the sign, the road bent to right, and they found themselves in the center of town.

The world was now full of places like this: empty, abandoned towns with barren streets and the dusty remnants of storefronts. After the cities, they had been the first to empty. They were out-of-the-way: packed with expensive boutiques, cafes, local tourism offices, and the odd grocery store.

And yet, something about this one made Thorin uneasy. Other towns and suburbs they’d scavenged in bore the marks of the attacks, and the subsequent chaos: broken windows, garbage and debris, overturned vehicles. This one, though, was oddly empty. There was a dumpster pushed halfway into the street, packing peanuts stuck together in puddles on the asphalt. There were a couple of abandoned cars, neither of which he and Dwalin bothered to touch, since fuel was fast turning stale and useless. But otherwise the street lay bare, many of the stores untouched. The shopfront windows gleamed in the morning sun. As they passed through he saw designer handbags in one window, gathering dust. In another, white plastic chairs and a high chromed counter, and a menu advertising frozen yogurt. A secondhand store, then an art gallery, the sign still intact, but the front window curiously devoid of paintings. There was no carnage, no violence to justify the emptiness. It was as if right at the beginning, the inhabitants of the town had banded together and vanished quietly into thin air.

Dwalin, who knew better where they were going, led on. After a ballet school and a small, brick office building, there was a supermarket at the far end of the road.

“Roche and Sons,” read Dwalin, as they stopped at the edge of the parking lot. It was the first thing either of them had said all day. “Pricy town, pricy sundries.” He grinned. He liked to delight in the fact that they didn’t have to pay for things anymore, and thus could afford anything they couldn’t have before, provided it still existed. Thorin found he couldn’t blame him.

They approached the main entrance, and found a gap of a couple of inches between the sliding glass doors, which together they managed to wrench apart. Once upon a time those doors would’ve opened automatically, and there would have been a blast of frigid air as they entered. There would have been harsh, fluorescent light from above, too, encased in thin tubes of glass. And there would have been other people, talking and pushing carts and clogging up the aisles.

As it was, the supermarket was dark and quiet. Dwalin was already moving past the row of dusty self-checkout machines, humming some cheerful, unknown tune, oblivious to the cold sense of abandonment Thorin always got when he entered places like this.

To their right was the produce section. This at least looked more like what he’d come to expect: dried husks of rotted fruit and vegetables, untouched on their display pallets. They bypassed these and moved into the aisles until they found what was left of the canned food.

Slowly they worked their way through the list, filling the cart with beans, pasta (no macaroni, but there were a few boxes of bowties), canned tomatoes and tuna, and whatever else was left on the shelf. At the end of an aisle they found a few sealed, intact gallon jugs of water and took those too, opening one to top off their water bottles. Though they could have filled the cart they didn’t, having learned the hard way long ago that it was more trouble than it was worth to try and clean out a store only to throw out their backs by the time they got halfway home.

Dwalin offered to split off to get toilet paper and bleach, and Thorin pretended not to notice him heading for the makeup and cosmetics aisle, or the look of disappointment on his face when he returned with their sundries, but otherwise empty-handed.

Together they made short work of it. When the task was done they sat outside on the curb, eating their sandwiches in the shade of the overhang. Before, if someone had told him he would one day find the sidewalk curb in front of a grocery store _peaceful_ , Thorin probably would’ve answered with a scornful laugh, but here he was. The world had grown quiet.

They lingered as long as they could, but eventually there was an unspoken, reluctant agreement that they needed to get going. The journey back would be a longer one, now that they were laden down with supplies. There were a few places in the backroads where they might have to unload and reload to get past a tricky piece of terrain, and the day wasn’t getting any cooler. Thorin stood and stretched, then dragged off the flannel shirt and tied it around his waist. Dwalin crumpled the paper towels their sandwiches had been packed in and tossed them into the cart, and they set off.

When they reached the main road Thorin walked a few feet ahead of the cart, until Dwalin spoke again.

“Is that what I think it is?”

The scrape of the wheels on asphalt had ceased. Dwalin had stopped in his tracks, squinting at something to their left. Thorin followed his friend’s gaze to a parking lot across the road, then chuckled. Nestled between the remains of a pizzeria and a credit union was the source of Dwalin’s interest. The doors were missing and one of the windowpanes was shattered, but the name Pet Mart was still spelled out above the entrance in blocky, red letters.

Dwalin had all but adopted the farm cat they’d found when they’d first arrived three years ago: a scrappy, ill-tempered ginger creature that hissed when she was petted. She’d earned the moniker “Beast” when she’d scratched Gloin, then Dis, then Thorin in the same three-hour span, shortly after they’d moved into the farmhouse. Dwalin was the only one who could even get close, much less pick her up with any sort of returned affection. Little if anything earned you a spot in her good graces, but one of the things that did was canned cat food.

“Go on,” Thorin said dryly.

Dwalin clapped his shoulder. “Meet back here in half an hour?” It wasn’t a question. He was already striding away.

They weren’t supposed to split up, and the first few times they’d scavenged together they hadn’t. But as weeks turned into months and then years, and the number of people they met on the road had dwindled down to nothing, they’d stopped worrying about staying within each other’s line of sight. They took precautions—staying within shouting distance, and never taking more than an hour before heading back to the farm. They’d never told Dis or Balin about these breaks. If they happened when Dwalin and Balin went on scavenging runs, Thorin didn’t know; he’d never asked. They didn’t when he was out with Dis.

Thorin pushed the shopping cart back up the center of the main road, drawing the back of his hand across his brow.

As he walked his mind wandered. He alighted on a memory of his grandfather, more sound and emotion than a precise image. (Vaguely he remembered Thror’s face as being chiseled: lined from a lifetime of hard labor and hard circumstances, as if actually hewn from rock, and not just stony in the poetic sense.) He, Frerin, and Dis had broken something while roughhousing in the living room: a picture frame, or maybe a vase. Thorin didn’t remember exactly what, only that at the time it had seemed like the most important thing in the world. Thror had discovered them and, clutching shards of glass in his knotted hands, snarled:

_You three know nothing of what it means to_ earn _your existence!_

He’d been eleven or twelve, old enough to feel a need to rationalize away his grandfather’s rage. Maybe it had been something of their grandmother’s. Maybe it had been more valuable than they’d realized. For once Frerin, by far the brashest of the three of them, hadn’t talked back. He’d stood uncharacteristically still, silent and cowed like his big brother. Dis, the youngest, had burst into tears and fled.

It was only years later, after Thror’s funeral, that Thorin had begun to recognize his grandfather’s unthinking callousness for what it was. The paranoia, the mood swings, the occasional explosions of outright cruelty—these were the whispers of illness, undiagnosed all his life, and only worsening as his mind had faltered with age.

At university, as back home his father’s physical health had begun to wane, Thorin had begun to recognize the scowl he saw in the mirror, the moodiness that sometimes took him without warning. He’d pushed away at those thoughts, instead running himself ragged in front of a punching bag, or just _running_ , sometimes in the middle of the night, never quite fast or far enough. He’d push through sleepless nights with cups of coffee, snapping at other students who stayed up late chatting in the common room, always needing to be more, to be _better_ , because letting himself slip meant going the way of his grandfather, and that way lay resentment and madness. After final exams he’d crawl into bed for a week, felled without exception by the end-of-term flu. _I am not my grandfather._ It became a mantra, a talisman against unspoken fears.

Graduation had brought more sleep and more perspective, partly in the form of counseling—long-delayed and much needed—and partly the form of his siblings’ good humor. Frerin in particular was never one to shy away from a jab at their grandfather. (“That old racist, homophobic git? Oh _absolutely_ , brother, the resemblance is _uncanny_.”) Dis, when he confided his concerns to her, would look flatly at him and answer with some variant of: “Don’t be an idiot, Thorin.”

Thror had spent so much time railing about their _softness_ , how they knew nothing about scratching a life from nothing.

_If only you could see us now,_ Thorin thought, looking around at the empty streets.

He walked for a minute more before turning onto a narrow road lined with more small boutiques, and what looked like the remains of an old mom-and-pop store. He was halfway down the street when the shop caught his eye.

There was no sign above the door—or maybe it had been removed—but he knew immediately what he was looking at. In Dis’ words, he was an addict and a snob, and he saw no need to argue the point. Thorin had spent a lot of time in nice coffee shops, enough to know that there was a _look_ to them. He knew this was the type of café frequented by people who only wanted to plug in and get some goddamn work done, preferably fueled by a nice double espresso. These were places with comfortable chairs and tables at the right height for typing on a laptop. If there was music, it was muted and instrumental. There were no uncomfortably faux-casual business meetings, no patrons on awkward first dates, and none of the no-technology, no-wifi, forced-human-interaction hipster bullshit to be found in other, _lesser_ establishments.

Thorin felt himself drawn towards the door, as if the café had its own gravitational pull. As if he was wearing a suit and tie instead of flannel and jeans, and had been cutting his hair regularly for the last three years.

He pushed the cart up onto the sidewalk and walked to the door, cupping his hands over his eyes to see inside. Through a film of dust, he could see wide tables with power strips, comfortable armchairs with blue upholstery, and dark wood everywhere. There was an actual bar, but no alcohol to be seen on the wall behind it. This was the kind of place workaholics came to hide, and drown their sorrows in caffeine.

Thorin studied the door handle for a moment, debating. Usually places like this were still locked, and he’d need to use the shotgun to get inside. Sometimes he and Dwalin did, when they needed to get into a store. But something inside him shrank from the thought. It seemed wrong to introduce broken glass to the equation. This was a diorama, a museum exhibit.

Not without a hint of longing, he exhaled and pressed his fingertips to the dusty glass again.

The door gave. Before he quite knew what was happening, he was stepping into cool darkness, the door sliding slowly shut behind him.

Inside the air was musty but dry. There was no stench of mold, but a lingering staleness that all buildings picked up within a couple years of their abandonment. He took a step forward. He swept his fingertips along the top of a table, following the grain of the dark wood. They came away coated with a fine layer of grit. And now that he glanced over to the window, he could see dust motes glittering in the bands of light that filtered through the windows. He coughed reflexively: it wouldn’t be safe to linger, not without a mask.

He moved between tables, at one point sitting in one of the blue upholstered chairs (it scraped jarringly on the floor as he pulled it out), trying to remember what it felt like to type on a laptop in an espresso-fueled fugue state. (The last time he’d ever touched a computer had been when the Internet had winked out for good, the moment he’d realized this was it, and there would be no help for them. Shortly afterward, they had run and Ered Luin had burned.) He stood again, flicking switches and pressing the buttons on power strips with no result. He felt like a ghost.

At some point it occurred to him then that he’d never actually been behind the counter of a coffee shop. He’d never worked in food service. Not that the cafes he’d frequented left anything to the imagination: every one he’d ever been in had had low counters, elevating the daily grind of the barista to performance art. But he’d never seen a café from the other sideof the counter. Seized by an impulse that—really—had always lingered somewhere in the back of his head, Thorin pushed through the little wooden gate behind the large, industrial grinders. He stood for a moment in front of an empty sink, then turned around and faced the room.

Not really all that exciting. He was just further back from the rest of the room. He made another three-sixty-degree turn, at a loss for what to do next. (Should he call out an unmistakably fake wrong name, scrawled on an enormous cup? No, they only did that in chain coffee shops…) He picked up an uncapped magic marker, long dried-out, then put it back down. He ducked his head to glance under the counter—and felt his breath still in his lungs.

Coffee grounds. Bags and bags of them. Vacuum sealed.

Tentatively, he picked up one of the bags. There was another bag right behind it, and another one behind that. _Three rows._ And on the shelf above, a handful of small metal stovetop presses, still in pristine, untouched little cardboard boxes.

Thorin put his hand on the counter to steady himself and made a point of trying to breathe normally.

The cart—the cart was on the sidewalk, full of beans and bleach and pasta and toilet paper. They needed those things. But there was a little room at the top, and Dwalin would be getting another cart for Beast, and surely cat food couldn’t take up that much space— _no._ He forced himself to think rationally. He conjured up visions of Dis’s most scornful glare. He channeled Balin.

The _sensible_ course of action would be to take a few packs—enough to tide him over for, say, a week—and one of the sturdy metal presses, then make a point of coming back. Pushing a cart full of coffee all the way to the farm on top of everything else would play hell with his back, and he was meant to be giving Fili and Kili shooting lessons tomorrow. He would shut the door and leave, and this place would remain untouched until then, as if he’d never been there in the first place.

Thorin nodded. That was the sensible course of action. He took a moment to congratulate himself on his logic.

Then he immediately went to retrieve the shopping cart.

* * *

Thorin had taken four or five trips to the shopping cart when it happened. He was ducked under the counter, loading as many bags of coffee into his arms as he could carry (as it happened, about ten without dropping any on the way to the cart). He was distracted by a dull clatter. He straightened up, fully expecting to see Dwalin standing there with a smug look on his face, and an amused jab about Thorin’s caffeine addiction at the ready.

He jumped and swore.

Standing there by the open door, a gray, slimy hand pressed to the glass, was a zombie.

He hadn’t seen one in months. The last had been at a great distance, and Dwalin had taken it out with a potshot from the .22 they kept for hunting deer. He, Balin, and Dis had gone to burn the corpse, while Thorin had kept Fili and Kili occupied with a book that was probably too adult for bedtime stories, but had distracted them from the excitement of the dead creature well enough.

This one was disconcertingly fresh. Its face was intact, its ruddy dress filthy but still recognizably floral, though if it had ever had shoes they were long since abandoned. There was a pearl earring in one grayish earlobe, and a slim fitness tracker biting into a decaying wrist.

Thorin backed up a step. At the farm, all too often he snapped at his nephews about the importance of caution. Shortcuts and dumb mistakes were what got people killed in this world: rusty nails and falls from unsteady ladders, failing to check the safety switch on a rifle, an undercooked strip of meat.

The shotgun was in the _shopping cart, you fucking idiot_ —right where he’d left it, buried under bags of coffee and toilet paper. He could see it through the glass door, poking up absurdly out of the baby basket. If Dis were there, she would’ve smacked him.

The zombie took a lurching step forward. It was still quick, the muscles of its legs not yet deteriorated. Its eyes were cloudy and blank—blindness was the earliest mark of the virus—but they seemed to fix on him with vicious intent. It screeched, spit flying from its rotting mouth, and Thorin flinched. If it were still human, he could have taken it: where he was tall and broad, it was short and slight. But the virus gave the infected strength and recklessness and dulled any sense of fear or pain. One this fresh probably could’ve taken Dwalin.

_Shit_.

Thorin edged left and the creature moved with him, toward the little gate at the end of the bar. He dodged right; the zombie again made to block his path. They moved in a bizarre dance, left-right-left-right, leaving Thorin trapped behind the bar as the zombie advanced.

Suddenly he remembered the bag of dark roast in his hand. It was large and vacuum sealed, as heavy as a small brick.

He hurled it at the zombie’s head. It missed and hit the opposite wall with a _smack_. The zombie snarled and took another step forward. Thorin grabbed another bag from under the counter, and this one made its mark. The creature screeched as the soft cartilage of its nose smashed inward. Thorin threw another bag and caught its arm, then a pair of espresso glasses, a metal frothing cup. A French press. A blender.

When the blender knocked into the zombie’s shoulder and smashed on the floor just to its left, it turned to him, mouth sneering. It lunged forward, shoving aside a chair, and launched itself over the bar.

Thorin ran. He pushed through the low wooden gate with a bang and scrambled through the café, knocking aside chairs and tables, heedless of the bruises he’d have if he somehow managed to get out of this. The shotgun was loaded. He only needed to get to the cart.

Behind him, a clatter. Then an iron grip on his ankle, and he was falling. By some miracle his head missed the table in front of him by centimeters. He landed hard, spikes of pain lancing up his forearms as he threw out his hands to catch himself. He kicked out and connected with something solid and fleshy. The zombie screamed. Its grip loosened. Thorin scrambled to his feet but the creature was on him, scrabbling at his shirt, too close, _much too close_ —

There was a chair between them. He grabbed at the back and made to push the creature away from him, but it ripped the wood from his hands and flung it aside. He managed only a desperate shout: _“DWALIN!”_ before the zombie lunged at him again, gray fingers gripping the collar of his shirt.

It was inhumanly strong. The creature’s momentum propelled him backward, and Thorin had just enough time to realize they were going through the window.

* * *

Bilbo had reached a small town.

It was pure luck, really. He had a map—lots of them, in fact, collected at truck stops and chambers of commerce and in the cupboards of abandoned houses—but it had been a long time since he’d tried very hard to plan his travel.

Between the map and the cheerful, weed-covered sign at the edge of the road, he knew this place had once been called Chetwood. It was the kind of place he would’ve driven to before, on a rainy Saturday afternoon, to sit in a café with a book and hide from his responsibilities. The kind of place he’d sip overpriced tea, looking over some view of a creek or a garden and avoiding plaintive emails from students and relatives.

He rarely ran into other people on the road, and so the time he spent wandering was time for his mind to wander as well. Sometimes the things that ran through his head were the old fairy tales his parents had told him, superimposed on the empty world around him. Sometimes they were absurd, hypothetical ramblings: outlandish conversations with imaginary strangers, arguments escalating into explosive violence, or scenes of quiet intimacy that would have made him blush to be caught thinking about before. What-ifs involving people from his past, all of whom he knew either to be missing or dead. It wasn’t consciously done, but it broke the flat monotony of his day.

Sometimes he’d slip into a memory.

He was thinking now of Hamfast Gamgee. Ham had been ten years or so older than Bilbo, and a family friend who had worked part-time at Bag End as a gardener, part-time on a degree in viticulture. He’d had a son, Samwise, and a wife, Bell. Bilbo didn’t know what had become of either of them. Neither had been there the day he’d finally mustered the courage to leave his barricaded apartment for good and make his way to his parents’ house at the edge of town.

He proceeded through the memory with detached indifference. What should have been a short hike had taken him all day. He remembered crouching behind parked cars, staying low and out of sight, jumping at every stray noise. He remembered his final dash up the hill, terrified that at any moment a creature would pop out from behind a hedge and tackle him to the ground, and that would be it. Pain and terror, and then—if he didn’t bleed out then and there—a slow, plodding march into madness.

No such assault had come, of course, and after a heart-pounding fumble with the keys, he’d made it into the house. There had been a lot of dust. He hadn’t been there in over a year, not since his mother had passed, and they’d buried her in the family plot next to his father. ( _Belladonna and Bungo Baggins, loving parents and friends: just missed the start of the apocalypse, lucky them_.) He remembered the broken glass in the foyer, the instinctive decision to grab the cricket bat sitting in the umbrella stand. The sudden creak of the kitchen door and the slow turn he’d made in front of the sink.

Ham had been a month gone at that point. At least, that was Bilbo’s estimate, given the timeline of the attacks, and the state of him by the time Bilbo finally made it to Bag End.

There had still been running water then. In his parents’ shower, he’d washed Ham’s blood out of his hair and watched it swirl down the drain. He’d dressed himself in old clothes of his father’s and burned his ruined ones in the fire pit in the back garden. Then he’d discarded his poor excuse for a pack and exchanged it for his mother’s, dusty and untouched in the back of her closet. After clothes, food, and camping gear, he’d taken a handful of pocket handkerchiefs, the pen and journal from his father’s writing desk, the bat, and (nearly an afterthought), the bright pink can opener that had been lying on the kitchen counter.

The whole thing played like a movie reel. Somewhere in the rational part of his mind, Bilbo knew there was something terribly wrong with this—something that would no doubt surface with ugly consequences someday. But for now, there was nothing to push all that to the surface, not when every day ahead of him looked more or less the same. The simmering annoyance of nagging relatives, the lingering suspicion that second dates were a thing that only happened to _other people_ , the sick, sinking feeling that he’d made all the wrong choices, and that the clock was ticking down the seconds of his life—all that had been swept away. There was no room for a breakdown when there were everyday questions about food, shelter, and safety.

He was so lost in his recollections that when he first heard the screech, he didn’t recognize it for what it was.

It startled him out of the memory nonetheless, and he stood in the middle of the empty street, surrounded only by blank parking meters and dusty boutiques. The bat was sticking out of the top of his pack, easily accessible: he pulled it out, grasping it in front of him with both hands like a sword. For a few long, silent seconds, he could hear nothing but his own breathing and the buzz of unseen insects in the trees above.

Then a distant crash, and an unintelligible scream.

Years later, Bilbo wouldn’t be able to explain what had caused him to run _toward_ the source of the noise rather than away from it. He’d become a creature of instinct, and in the end that was probably what accounted for everything that was to follow.

He ran up the street, his pack bouncing behind him, turning a sharp right toward the source of another crash. In the next moment he saw a shopping cart parked haphazardly on the sidewalk, in front of an unmarked shop. It was piled high with cans, toilet paper, a multitude small brown packages, and the butt of a rifle.

He was just in time to see a man and a zombie come crashing through the front window.

* * *

Thorin barely registered the broken glass. The wind had been knocked out of him. The creature was on top of him, foul-breathed and wide-eyed and biting reflexively, teeth clamping down on empty air. Its hands closed around his throat. He caught its jaws and pushed back, but he was pinned. The creature’s knees were pushing into his diaphragm, keeping him from drawing breath. He didn’t have the air to yell for Dwalin again. He tightened his grip on its jaw, trying to force it back, and the skin slipped loose under his fingers against the bone. The creature let out a gurgling shriek, saliva dripping from its rotting lips. Thorin shut his eyes instinctively. He was starting to grow lightheaded. It was only a matter of time before his arms started to shake, before his strength failed.

Then came a loud, wooden _thwack,_ and inexplicably, the weight on his chest was gone. He rolled onto his side, gasping, and opened his eyes.

The street was sideways. There was blood and glass on the pavement, and the zombie was on the ground, several feet away, screeching. Someone was advancing on it. Thorin saw a mop of curly, light brown hair, a green, sweat-soaked tee-shirt, and a bat raised high.

The stranger swung. The bat connected with the zombie’s face and it let out a bloody moan, spitting teeth onto the ground. The bat came down again and the zombie crumpled. The stranger swung over and over—Thorin lost count how many swings it took—until the creature’s head was a grayish, bloody pulp. Its body twitched, then finally lay still on the asphalt.

The stranger kicked the zombie lightly, as if to make sure it wasn’t going to get up again—then let the tip of the bat drop to the ground and collapsed in on themself, hands braced on knees, wheezing for breath.

After a few moments the stranger turned. It became clear he was a man. Thorin saw bright hazel eyes, and a face that was simultaneously boyish and not. Still bent double, the man gasped after a moment: “Are—you—okay?”

Thorin stumbled to his feet. He could feel the glass in his skin now. There were myriad tiny, stinging cuts that would have to be meticulously cleaned—but no broken bones, and no bites. He managed a nod.

“It didn’t—” the stranger tried to straighten up and failed, beset by a bout of coughing. He gestured vaguely at Thorin with one blood-spattered hand. “—get you, did it?”

“No.”

After a few more moments, the man seemed to catch his breath. He straightened up. “I haven’t had to kill one of those in ages,” he said. That bat dangled loosely in his grip. A few feet away, a reddish-brown pack lay discarded on the ground. He retrieved a water bottle from one of the mesh side pouches, raised it to his lips, then saw the state of his hands and lowered it in vague disgust.

Thorin didn’t respond. He knew needed to say _something_ , but for the life of him he couldn’t think what.

The stranger didn’t seem to notice his reticence. “Haven’t had to run like that in ages either,” he said, pressing a hand to his ribs.

Thorin nodded, and didn’t answer this either. A fleeting memory came to him: a Saturday morning spent at one of Kili’s football games, standing awkwardly amidst a group of chatting parents, and praying for Dis’s return from the snack shack.

The stranger finally looked up at him. “You don’t talk very much, do you,” he observed.

_Say something, you utter asshole._ “No,” Thorin said again.

The stranger chuckled. “D’you live alone, then?”

He felt a bolt of anxiety. Safety in numbers was a cardinal rule: scavenge in pairs, never leave anyone alone at the house. Strangers were best warned that a lone wanderer in an abandoned town had friends who would come after him.

His concern must have shown on his face, because the man backpedaled hastily: “I just mean since you don’t talk much. That’s all.”

There was a long enough pause that Thorin stumbled over his answer: “No, I live with…people,” he finished clumsily.

The stranger didn’t press the point, looking instead to the coffee shop. “Is this place yours?”

Thorin shook his head. “Just looking for supplies.”

“Anything good?”

He shrugged. “Coffee?”

A rueful smile came over the man’s face. “Ah. Tea drinker.”

They lapsed into an uncomfortable silence. Thorin shifted and cleared his throat, searching for something to say, but all that came out was a thoroughly eloquent, “Um.”

The stranger eyed him archly. “Are you sure you’re okay?”

Thorin cleared his throat again. “Yes. Uh.” _Talk, damn you._ “Haven’t seen one of those in a long time either.” He cast about for something to talk about and his gaze landed again on the man’s pack. It wasn’t reddish-brown, he realized, but merely filthy, caked with a fine layer of dirt. In a mesh pouch that might have carried a water bottle was a bright pink can opener. “You’re a traveler, then,” he concluded.

“Yeah. Apocalypse actually happens, not tied down, all job prospects _pfft_ —” the stranger made a sweeping gesture with one hand, “—so of course everybody figures, ‘Why not break out the old camping gear? Prime time for a holiday.’” He knelt by the pack, unzipping a pocket at the top and extracting a yellowish square of cloth, which Thorin realized a moment later was an embroidered handkerchief. The stranger then unclipped a small bottle from one of the straps: hand sanitizer. He doused the handkerchief and started wiping blood off the bat, then off his hands. He added with a mild laugh, “I never made time to travel before, so. No time like the present.” Hands mostly clean, he dropped the handkerchief on the corpse and reached into his pack again. Then he frowned, almost petulant. “Oh, _damn it_ , that was my last one.”

“We might have some spares at the house,” Thorin said.

The stranger glanced up at him.

He wasn’t quite sure how those words had come out of his mouth. He’d meant to say _thank you_. He’d meant to say, _There’s a supermarket up the road if you’re looking for supplies._ He’d meant to say, _Good luck. You seem like a good person. I hope you make it._

The last thing he’d meant to do was invite the man back to the farm on the pretext of having extra pocket handkerchiefs lying around.

The stranger stared at him, and the back of his neck burned. _We might have some spares at the house_ —for fuck’s sake. It was as poor a thank-you as he’d ever heard. And yet, somehow, his mouth was still moving. It was like he was watching himself from outside his body: a spectator of a mindless reality show, shouting abuse at the television.

“Or we could make some,” he added.

Really, it was a wonder the man didn’t burst out laughing, or just pick up his pack and start walking away. Still, he did neither of those things, just continued to stare at Thorin as if he couldn’t quite believe what he was hearing.

“And a spare bed.”

That did it: Thorin clamped his mouth shut, cringing at the unintended double-entendre.

For a long time, the stranger said nothing. When he finally answered, his tone was carefully neutral. “I’d hate to impose,” he said. He was suddenly very still.

In the next silence, Thorin recognized the look of someone trying very hard not to get their hopes up.

He thought about what Dis would say, what Balin would say, and where on earth the stranger would actually _sleep_ : all the bedrooms were already occupied. His eyes flickered over to the bloody mess of the zombie.

“You wouldn’t be.”

The man’s face lit up. There was no other way to describe it: something in his eyes just grew _brighter_. It had the dual effect of making him look younger and making Thorin look at him as a whole: the filthy pack, the threadbare, sweat-stained clothing, the creases around his eyes.

“I’d like that.” Barely containing a grin, the stranger jumped to his feet and stuck out the cleaner of two hands. “Bilbo. Bilbo Baggins.”

“Thorin Durin,” Thorin returned.

Bilbo made to shoulder his pack. “Shall we get your coffee, then?”

Thorin nodded. “And Dwalin,” he added in a mutter, moving to retrieve the cart. He suppressed a scowl. Dwalin was going to be _insufferable_ about this.

From behind him, Bilbo asked, “What’s a Dwalin?”


End file.
